Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted.

Four directors tell tales of Eros fit for a 1970s Decameron. Working-class lovers, Renzo and Luciana, marry but must hide it from her employer; plus, they need a room of their own. A billboard of Anita Ekberg provocatively selling milk gives a prudish crusader for public decency more than he can handle. The wife of a count whose escapades with call girls make the front page of the papers decides to work to prove her independence, but what is she qualified to do? A buxom carnival-booth manager who owes back taxes offers herself for one night in a lottery: a nerdy sacristan and a jealous cowboy make for a lovers' triangle. In each, women take charge, but not always happily.

Shot on location with a cast of nonprofessional actors, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece follows Umberto D., an elderly pensioner, as he struggles to make ends meet during Italy’s postwar economic boom. Alone except for his dog, Flike, Umberto strives to maintain his dignity while trying to survive in a city where traditional human kindness seems to have lost out to the forces of modernization. Umberto’s simple quest to fulfill the most fundamental human needs—food, shelter, companionship—is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever filmed and an essential classic of world cinema.

Stories about three very different women and the men they attract. These three stories very "Italian" indeed, are full of good humour, social observation and correct atmosphere. The direction of De Sica is superb, the acting of Mastroianni and Loren is unique and in the second and third stories we recognize the subtle and superior hand of their author, the great Zavattini.

The war, that doesn’t save up its bombardments in Rome, induces Cesira, a youth widow, owner of a modest grocery, to look for a shelter among the mountains of the Ciociaria where she was born. Her constant worry is that to the little thirteen-year-old child, Rosetta, are saved up the afflictions, the anguishes and the sufferings that the war inflicts also to the civilians how it is possible. They are friends, relatives and the serenity of the places that seem cut out of the tragicalness of those times to welcome the two women. But the front, in continous movement along the peninsula is getting near. The first victim of that small community is Michele, a timid person in love with Cesira, that in his tormented spirit of literate and wise farmer suffers more than the others the deep crisis of the war. A group of Germans, that tries to escape the pressing of the Allies, forces the youth to be their guide through the mountains.

Following The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio De Sica’s second effort as a producer-director was acclaimed internationally, winning the Grand Prize at Cannes, and voted Best Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics in 1951. The story of a saint-like orphan boy who rises up to fight for the rights of vagabonds living in a shanty town threatened by a greedy developer, De Sica adds a playful, fairytale dimension to the film's grim social realism. Anticipating the surrealism of Fellini’s later work, Miracle in Milan plays as a neorealist fable, a heart-warming tale of good versus evil as the discarded people of the streets – portrayed by real-life homeless people – challenge the elite that consigned them to poverty. Through it all, the protagonist Toto is offered up as a ray of innocence and hope in a world sullied by avarice and injustice.

Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Shoeshine was filmed on location in postwar Rome using non-professional actors. It was inspired by the real stories of those struggling to overcome the oppressive forces of a corrupt and ineffective political system. Shoeshine is widely regarded as one of the finest films to have emerged from the Italian neorealist cinema. It was also the first foreign film to receive an Oscar. "The high quality of this motion picture," noted the Academy, "brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity."

In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair's subsequent work on some of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism, The Children Are Watching Us is a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family's disintegration. (-DVD cover)